VMworld 2017 did not disappoint! While spending an awesome week in Las Vegas I walked about 38 miles, attended a ton of great sessions, and did a lot of learning. I am glad to be back home and already looking forward to next year!

Mandalay Bay Conference Center

VMworld Announcements:

There were some great VMware announcements this year. In my opinion here are the top three:

HCI Acceleration Kit: This kit This kit includes vSphere Standard and vSAN Standard for three-node, unlimited VM cluster of single socket servers for $7,850 limited to a single site installation. That is a 25% discount over list pricing. Read More Here

In this blog post I will be upgrading (migrating) a Windows vCenter 5.5 deployment to a vCenter Server 6.5 Appliance. VMware vSphere 6.5 finally went general availability on November 15th 2016 (Read GA announcement here). There are many new features and changes in 6.5. The first noticeable change is the thick C# vSphere client is not available with the introduction of the HTML5 vSphere client. Another feature addition is the VCSA now has VMware Update Manager fully integrated. No need for an additional Windows Server to run VUM!

There are quite a few clicks needed to add a host to vCenter. If you are deploying multiple hosts to your environment you have many clicks ahead. You should script it! This PowerShell script will make adding multiple hosts to vCenter easy!

On May 18th VMware announced the end of the road for the C# vSphere Thick Client. The next version of vSphere the thick client will not be available. VMware has been building up to this moment and previously announced they wanted to move to a web based client to have maximum compatibility and mobility. The current versions of the vSphere thick client will remain supported (5.5, 6.0) until their end of life cycle. So what does the future look like for the vSphere Client? VMware will keep the existing Flash web client and introduce the HTML5 based vSphere Client. The Flash web client will remain so third party developers can migrate their plugins over to the long term HTML5 client.

The HTML 5 Web Client Fling is available to download and install. It gives a fantastic view of how VMware envisions the new HTML 5 client. There are quite a few limitations in the current form but VMware will have the kinks worked out before it becomes the primary client. Below is how to deploy the v1.6 HTML 5 Client Fling and link to a VCSA:

In Part 8 of this Boring series I will be setting up an Instant Clone Desktop Pool. This is one of the coolest features announced of Horizon 7 in my opinion! You may have heard of Project Fargo (aka vmFork) announced during the keynote speech of VMworld 2014. This is the result of that project! Instant Clone gives you the ability to rapidly deploy VMs (children) from a already powered on and running VM (parent). The child clones share the memory and disk of the parent for Reads while Writes are placed in a delta disk. To read more about Instant Clone technology check out this VMware Blog post.

Part 5 of the series will be configuring the environment so Horizon View can be accessed remotely. There are some ports that need to be opened up on your firewall to the Security Server. As every environment is different I will show how my environment looks so you can mirror it.

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In part 4 of the series we will be adding a existing Microsoft Remote Desktop Services farm to Horizon View 7. This enables RDS application to be published out using Horizon View 7 taking advantage of the PCoIP protocol, View Management, and creates a single pane of glass to access applications and virtual desktops.